Charles Williams: The Sailcloth Shroud

“Was there anything foreign about it at all? I don’t mean low comedy or vaudeville, but any hesitancy, or awkwardness of phrasing?”

“No,” I said. “It was American.”

“I see.” Soames tapped meditatively on the desk with the eraser end of a pencil. “Now, you say he was an experienced sailor. But he had no papers, and you don’t think he’d ever been a merchant seaman, so you must have wondered about it. Could you make any guess as to where he’d picked up this knowledge of the sea?”

“Yes. I think definitely he’d owned and sailed boats of his own, probably boats in the offshore cruising and ocean-racing class. Actually, a merchant seaman wouldn’t have known a lot of the things Baxter did, unless he was over seventy and had been to sea under sail. Keefer was a good example. He was a qualified A.B.; he knew routine seamanship and how to splice and handle line, and if you gave him a compass course he could steer it. But if you were going to windward and couldn’t quite lay the course, half the time he’d be lying dead in the water and wouldn’t know it. He had no feel. Baxter did. He was one of the best wind-ship helmsmen I’ve ever run into. Besides native talent, that takes a hell of a lot of experience you don’t pick up on farms or by steering power boats or steamships.”

“Did he know celestial navigation?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s a funny thing, but I think he did. I mean, he never mentioned it, or asked if he could take a sight and work it out for practice, but somehow I got a hunch just from the way he watched me that he knew as much about it as I did. Or maybe more. I’m no whiz; there’s not much occasion to use it in the Bahamas.”

“Did he ever use a term that might indicate he could have been an ex-Navy officer? Service slang of any kind?”

“No-o. Not that I can recall at the moment. But now you’ve mentioned it, nearly everything about him would fit. And I’m pretty sure they teach midshipmen to sail at the Academy.”

“Yes. I think so.”

“He didn’t have a class ring, though. No rings of any kind.”

“You didn’t have a camera aboard, I take it?”

“No,” I said.

“That’s too bad; a snapshot would have been a great help. What about fingerprints? Can you think of any place aboard we might raise a few? I realize it’s been sixteen days—”

“No. I doubt there’d be a chance. She’s been in the yard for the past four, and everything’s been washed down.”

“I see.” Soames stood up. “Well, we’ll just have to try to locate somebody in the Zone who knew him. Thank you for coming in, Mr. Rogers. We may be in touch with you later, and I’d appreciate it if you would think back over those four days when you have time, and make a note of anything else you recall. You’re living aboard, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes association helps. You might be reminded of some chance remark he let fall, the name of a city, or yacht club, or something like that. Call us if you think of anything that could help.”

“Sure, I’ll be glad to,” I said. “I don’t understand, though, why he would give me a fake address. Do you suppose the name was phony too?”

Soames’ expression was polite, but it indicated the conversation was over. “We really have no reason to think so, that I can see.”

I walked over and caught a cab in front of the Warwick Hotel. During the ten-minute ride across the city to the eastern end of the waterfront and Harley’s boatyard, I tried to make some sense out of the whole affair. Maybe Willetts was right, after all; Keefer could have stolen that money from Baxter’s suitcase. If you assumed Baxter had lied about where he was from, he could have been lying about everything. And he’d never actually said he didn’t have any money; he’d merely implied it. That was the hell 0f it; he’d never actually said anything. He became more mysterious every time you looked at him, and when you tried to get hold of something concrete he was as insubstantial as mist.

But what about Keefer? Even if you could bring yourself to accept the premise that he was low enough to steal from a dead man—which was a little hard to swallow—how could he have been that stupid? Maybe he was no mental giant, but still it must have occurred to him that if Baxter was carrying that much money somebody must know about it, some friend or relative, and when the money turned up missing there’d be an investigation and charges of theft. Then a disquieting thought occurred to me. So far, nobody had claimed the money. What did you make of that? Had Keefer known, before he took it? But how could he? Then I shrugged, and gave up. Hell, there wasn’t even any proof that Keefer had stolen anything.

The taxi bumped across the tracks. I got out at the boatyard entrance and paid off the driver. This end of the waterfront was quiet on Saturday afternoon. To the right was another small shipyard that was closed now, and a half mile beyond that the city yacht basin, and Quarantine, and then the long jetties running out into the open Gulf. To the left were the packing sheds and piers where the shrimp boats clustered in a jungle of masts and suspended nets. These gave way in the next block to the first of the steamship terminals, the big concrete piers and slips that extended along the principal waterfront of the port.

The old watchman swung back the gate. “Here’s your key,” he said. “They had me come with ‘em while they searched the boat. Didn’t bother anything.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Didn’t say what they was looking for,” he went on tentatively.

“They didn’t tell me either,” I said. I went aboard the Topaz and changed clothes in the stifling cabin. Nothing was disturbed, as far as I could see. It was only three p.m.; maybe I could still get some work done. I loaded the pockets of my dungarees with sandpaper, went back up the mainmast, and resumed where I’d left off sanding, just below the spreaders. I sat in the bosun’s chair, legs gripping the mast to hold myself in against it while I smoothed the surface of the spar with long strokes of the abrasive. For the moment I forgot Keefer, and Baxter, and the whole puzzling mess. This was more like it. If you couldn’t be at sea, the next best thing was working about a boat, maintaining her, dressing her until she sparkled, and tuning her until she was like something alive. It seemed almost a shame to offer her for sale, the way she was shaping up. Money didn’t mean much, except as it could be used for the maintenance and improvement of the Orion.

I looked forward and aft below me. Another three or four days should do it. She’d already been hauled, scraped, and painted with anti-fouling. Her topsides were a glistening white. The spars and other brightwork had been taken down to the wood, and when I finished sanding this one and the mizzen I could put on the first coat of varnish. Overhaul the tracks and slides, replace the lines in the outhauls, reeve new main and mizzen halyards, replace that frayed headstay with a piece of stainless steel, give the deck a coat of gray nonskid, and that would about do it The new mains’l should be here by Tuesday, and the yard ought to have the refrigerator overhauled and back aboard by then. Maybe I’d better jack them up about it again on Monday morning.

Probably start the newspaper ad next Wednesday, I thought. She shouldn’t be around long at $15,000, not the way she was designed and built. If I still hadn’t sold her in ten days, I’d turn her over to a yacht broker at an asking price of twenty, and go back to Miami. The new mains’l had hurt, and I hadn’t counted on having to rebuild the refrigerator, but still I’d be home for less than nine thousand.